Ellington v. State
| Decision Date | 09 August 2022 |
| Docket Number | S22A0477 |
| Parties | ELLINGTON v. THE STATE. |
| Court | Georgia Supreme Court |
Vincent Ellington was tried by a Fulton County jury and convicted of malice murder and other crimes in connection with the shooting death of Jeremy Kanard Fulton.[1] Ellington raises two claims of error on appeal: (1) the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to support his convictions; and (2) the trial court erred when it limited his cross-examination of one of the State's witnesses. As noted in footnote 1 and in Division 4, we have identified a merger error that requires us to vacate in part and remand for resentencing. Otherwise, as explained more below, we affirm Ellington's convictions.
1. Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdicts, the evidence presented at trial showed the following. On the evening of May 6, 2016, a large group of people was hanging out at an Atlanta shopping center. The shopping center included a barbershop, a Family Dollar, a pool hall, and a cafe. Witnesses described the gathering as a party atmosphere with somewhere between 65 to 150 or more people in attendance, playing music, drinking, and selling clothes, among other things.
According to Ellington's girlfriend, Nicole Durden, Ellington borrowed her burgundy Chevrolet Impala that night and drove Durden's two-year-old son, Meshiah, to the shopping center. Other witnesses who were at the shopping center testified that Ellington was also accompanied by an acquaintance who was wearing a straw hat. Ellington and the man with the straw hat went inside the barbershop to sell clothes and other merchandise. Multiple witnesses testified that Ellington was wearing an orange shirt and had a baby with him.[2]
When Fulton tried to purchase clothes from the man in the straw hat, the two men started arguing over the price. One witness testified that she saw a "dude" wearing an "orange sweater" with a baby in the barbershop with another "guy selling clothes" in a straw hat. She saw the man in the straw hat arguing with Fulton and during that argument, the man wearing orange left the barbershop carrying the baby. Another witness, John Hill, testified that a man was selling "merchandise" inside the barbershop with another man who was holding a toddler. The man with the toddler exited the barbershop, and the barbershop owner then asked the man selling merchandise to leave. A few seconds later, the man who had been holding the toddler returned inside the barbershop "to get his companion and leave." The two men then exited the barbershop.
Approximately 15 or 20 seconds later, Hill also left the barbershop and went near his car in the parking lot to urinate. Hill testified that "[s]hortly after" he went outside, he "heard a little commotion" and "quarrelling." Hill turned around and saw "two guys at the back end of a car," then he saw a raised arm and heard three gunshots. Hill testified that he did not see the gun and that he could not describe or identify the two men because it was dark outside. But he heard a "bumping sound" that he assumed was the car "rolling over" or "back[ing] into" the victim, later verified to be Fulton, because "he fell right directly behind the car." After Fulton was shot, the shooter jumped into a car, which witnesses described as "maroon or burgundy" or "red," and drove away. Despite witnesses' attempts to help Fulton, he died at the hospital in the early morning hours of May 7; the medical examiner who performed the autopsy concluded that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the chest.
Two other witnesses in the parking lot described the shooter. One of them testified that the person firing the gun was a man wearing an orange shirt, though he later expressed uncertainty about the shooter's shirt color. This witness did not see Fulton with a gun at any point, but heard multiple gunshots before he saw Fulton fall "facedown" to the ground. The other witness testified that she saw a man in an "orangey-colored" shirt shooting in the parking lot. When they were later shown photographic lineups, neither of these witnesses was able to identify Ellington as the shooter.
According to Durden, Ellington and his acquaintance arrived at her apartment between 11:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. that night to drop off Meshiah. Durden testified that when Ellington entered her apartment, he looked "shocked" and told her that "some dudes followed him out to the car" and "a shooting started." Durden testified that Meshiah looked as if "something happened that scared him." After leaving Meshiah with Durden, Ellington and his acquaintance left Durden's apartment. The next day, Durden went outside and saw that her car was full of bullet holes that had not been there the night before. She also testified that some of those bullet holes were near where Meshiah would sit in his car seat in her car. Durden was "upset" and called Ellington, who just repeated that there was a shooting.
Ricky Glover, the "neighborhood mechanic" at Durden's apartment complex, testified that Ellington called him on May 7 to ask him to fix a flat tire on Durden's Impala; phone records corroborated that a call was made from Ellington's phone to Glover's that day. While Glover fixed the flat tire, he noticed bullet holes in the car. When Glover asked Ellington what happened, Ellington said that "a guy started shooting and the car got shot" in "the apartment" parking lot. Glover volunteered to fix the bullet holes for an additional fee. Glover applied Bondo body filler that Ellington had bought earlier that day[3], but did not finish sanding or painting the car, so he left the supplies inside the car to finish the job later.
As part of law enforcement's investigation of the case, Detective Jamael Logan obtained a copy of a video surveillance tape from an Atlanta Police camera located near the crime scene that partially captured the events in the shopping center parking lot the night Fulton was shot. That surveillance video, which was admitted into evidence and played for the jury at trial, appeared to show a man wearing an orange shirt in the parking lot around the time of the shooting and then a car that matched witnesses' descriptions of the shooter's vehicle backing out of the lot.
The afternoon following the shooting, after viewing the surveillance video and speaking with witnesses, Detective Logan issued a "lookout citywide" for a "maroon four-door Chevy Impala possibly with damage of bullet holes." That night, while working an evening shift as a security guard at Durden's apartment complex, Sergeant David Remec received an anonymous call about a "suspicious vehicle in a back parking lot." Behind the apartment complex, Sergeant Remec found a "maroon-in-color" Chevy Impala that had "fresh Bondo" on the front right of the car, and he noticed that the front right tire was a "used tire that was just put on the vehicle." Upon locating the vehicle, Sergeant Remec contacted the Atlanta Police Department's homicide unit, Detective Logan obtained a search warrant, and Durden's car was towed. A crime scene technician processed the car for evidence and latent fingerprints, took photos, and collected as evidence (among other things) an AutoZone bag that contained Bondo and a can of primer.
Ellington was arrested in July 2016. In a recording of Ellington's call to Durden from jail, Ellington told Durden to "stay silent[4] and stay strong" and said, "don't let them folks come to you with no bulls**t." Days later, Detective Logan searched Ellington's house. During that search, Detective Logan did not find a gun or any of the clothing that witnesses stated they saw the shooter wearing, such as an orange shirt. When Ellington was made aware of that fact, he commented on a recorded phone call from jail to Durden that law enforcement would "never find" those items because they were "looking in the wrong house." In the weeks following his arrest, Ellington called Durden multiple times. Recordings of those calls reveal that Ellington asked Durden questions such as, "Are you rolling with [me] or against [me]?" and "Are you going to leave [me] in [here]?"
At trial, Ellington moved for a directed verdict after the State finished presenting evidence, arguing that the State presented only circumstantial evidence and failed to present any witnesses who "put[ ] a gun in Mr. Ellington's hand" or "identified him as being the person who actually shot Mr. Fulton." The trial court denied Ellington's motion for a directed verdict, and the jury later convicted Ellington on all counts except aggravated assault with a motor vehicle.
2. Ellington contends that the trial court erred in denying his motion for a directed verdict because the evidence was insufficient to sustain his convictions. To that end, Ellington asserts that the State's case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence and that the State presented no evidence from which the jury could find that he possessed the requisite intent needed to prove the charged crimes or that he even committed the act of shooting Fulton. For the reasons explained below, this enumeration of error fails.
When evaluating a challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence as a matter of constitutional due process, we view all of the evidence presented at trial in the light most favorable to the verdicts and ask whether any rational trier of fact could have found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes for which he was convicted. See Jones v State, 304 Ga. 594, 598 (820 S.E.2d 696) (2018) (citing Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 318-319 (99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560) (1979)). "The standard of review for the denial of a motion for a directed verdict of acquittal is the same as for determining the sufficiency of...
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